You’d think they could have just tossed it into the sun. It’s still pretty warm isn’t it?
yeah except that plot was used in Generations.
Clearly, the intense gravitational forces would have rendered the red matter inert.
If Vulcan’s sun were turned into a black hole then the planet Vulcan wouldn’t be sucked in, it would just keep on orbiting the black hole like it did the sun, just darker.
dwolfe
525
That’s a fairly slow death by freezing for Vulcan, they could save people.
…why couldn’t they just drop the red matter and SHOOT IT with phasers to ignite it, though? I imagine a phaser is hotter than the core of the planet.
When the nadion particles from a phaser beam interact with the red matter, a localized tripolar inverse wave is created in the surrounding area, causing a quantum flux capacitance strong enough to disrupt the formulation of any singularities. Although if we modify the main deflector it just might work, but then you’d have to charge the negative power couplings.
garin
527
The Narada didn’t seem to have any energy weapons.
Edit: Oh, except for the enormous mining laser, I suppose. I’m sure wonderpug has it right.
But only if you reverse the polarity of phase inducers after taking the Heisenberg compensators offline.
balut
529
But doing so would not only blow the starboard power coupling and EPS power conduits, but in a worst-case scenario would cause a coolant leak and warp core breach.
Yes. When I first saw WoK as a wee lad, I’d never seen the TOS episode Khan came from and I still loved it. In fact it might’ve been several years before I finally caught a rerun of Space Seed.
Fucking shaking camera during action sequences. They might as well put static on the screen; it’s not like it gets you into the action anymore once you’ve seen it a few times.
Other than that, wow, what a fantastic reboot. The only thing I didn’t get was more.
What the hell was scotty’s helper monkey about?
I miss the old hand-created ship models; they had a dirtier, more subtle look to them. All the damn computer graphics look too flat.
Niven used chain-reaction supernovas in his books, though the internet says the physics there are ridiculous.
Ignoring gravitational turbulence from an uneven collapse and emitted nasty radiation, surprisingly no. You could replace the sun with a black hole of the same mass and it wouldn’t change a thing other than the lack of light and solar wind - a given mass has a given gravitational effect, regardless of density.
I really liked this, and enjoyed it immensely more than 90% of the other Star Trek films or television.
I thought the Vulcan genocide was treated a little too lightly. I mean, we’re not talking about a planet of rodent Ewoks or loathsome Gungans dying or even Aldaran but Vulcans are/were a cornerstone if not THE cornerstone of Federation civilization. Every single character has dry eyes after billions of them are murdered. The only character that treats the situation with any gravitas at all is Prime Spock, but every character should have a reaction to this type of atrocity and we aren’t really shown any in the film. I’m not sure there’s another event that can truly be compared to it.
The ending scene with all the cheering also seemed out of place to me with the magnitude of the Vulcan loss. StarFleet didn’t win a narrow victory in this movie, it suffered its largest loss of all time. Maybe that’s pushing it a bit, but I was truly stunned when I saw Vulcan actually destroyed.
I think it’s fine to depart radically from the original series, but I would have preferred to see some acknowledgement about how big of a jump they had just taken.
Pogo
534
I can’t believe I’m jumping into this.
The use of the red matter is to create a black hole, right? In order to do that, it has to suck in available matter and condense it to infinite density. In order to suck it in, it needs to create a gravitational force strong enough to pull in the surrounding planet. Doing this results in a point in space that has a higher gravitational force than it did before… i.e. the black hole is more massive than just the mass of the planet itself.
Stars use all their mass to become a black hole, and there is no net increase in mass, which is why planets are unaffected by the gravitational force of the black hole because it’s the same.
God damn nerds, look at what you made me do.
Like everyone on the planet Vulcan when it collapsed, I am unstoppably sucked into this thread. I think this movie was great, truly enjoyable, and a worthy reboot for what I would consider a dead franchise.
One thing though, the comedy moments with Scotty/Simon Pegg were a little over the top, especially the bit where he’s sucked through the Enterprise’s coolant tubes. That was just embarrassing.
I forget if this was discussed earlier, but does the Red Matter hand-waving also explain why the planet centered black hole sucked in the entire planet in a matter of minutes? If I’m not mistaken, it would take years and years for a singularity at the center of a planet to have any noticeable effect: the singularity starts with a very small mass, so it has only a very small gravitational field, and absorbs the core of the planet only very slowly.
I guess the red matter could explain both these phenomena by somehow creating a “more massive” singularity than would otherwise be allowed.
Help me understand how faster-than-light movement, teleportation, telepathy, artificial gravity, and time travel get a pass, but the mechanics of red matter black holes and the details of how Nero’s ship is so powerful require great scrutiny?
My guess is because faster than light travel, teleportation, and telepathy are generally poorly understood, or purely theoretical, so a fair amount of hand-waving is allowable. Aritifical Gravity (for instance), is admittedly a cheat to allow having non-toroidal spaceships (marketing!) but still let people walk around in a relatable manner instead of floating around the screen.
When you’re addressing something that has relatively well understood mechanics, like black hole formation, you’re held to a higher standard. The point is that, generally, we’re holding them to the standard of well understood scientific knowledge. For things beyond modern scientific knowledge (eg. warp engines), they get a pass as long as they’re internally consistent, because that’s accepted as a storytelling convenience. By analogy, if you’re writing a story about ghost hunting, the mechanics of the ghosts are entirely up to the writer to define, but, say, basic newtonian mechanics as applied to physical objects should still remain the same, because the latter are well understood.
There’s also a lot of “new things deserve more scrutiny than old things, which we’ve largely come to terms with, and discussed already”.
I did say “relatively”.
Compared to say, telepathy, or time travel.
